Collect of multiple records backed by Excel in OneDrive for Business creates one version per record

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Posted on by MikaelSvenson

Using Excel as a data storage in OneDrive for business is very slow as each record adds a new version to the file.

Sample:

ClearCollect(MyChanges, {Name:"a", Count:1},{Name:"a", Count:1},{Name:"a", Count:1});
Collect(DataLog, MyChanges)

DataLog is my table in the Excel file, and checking version history I see three new versions added when running Collect. And, there are no easy way to turn off versioning in ODB today either (not that I really would 🙂

Thanks,

Mikael

Categories:

Building Power Apps

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Brian Dang 3,976 on at

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Hi,
I started on OneDrive when PowerApps first came out. Writing one record took 20-30s. I quickly switched over to Dropbox, which is another free one. Writing on Dropbox is 2-3s. I made an app to record the elapsed time during Patch operations:

If your apps don't require heavy repeated writing back to the datasource, Dropbox is convenient, free, and tolerable.

But I will vouch that Common Data Model is the fastest, hands down. I can patch multiple times in one second. Switching over took time and labor, but it was worth it.
MikaelSvenson 36 on at

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I agree that the Common Data Model is by far the best option in terms of ease, but it comes at a license cost. I'll go with a SharePoint list for now. Using Excel is just not feasable - but it would make as a nice power user route to PowerBI 🙂

And dropbox is not really an option for production data to me as we don't have any corporate accounts there.